Urban Studies and Planning - Ph.D. / Sc.D.http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/7875
Tue, 06 Mar 2018 23:58:16 GMT2018-03-06T23:58:16ZCultivating risk : weather insurance, technology and financialization in Indiahttp://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/113802
Cultivating risk : weather insurance, technology and financialization in India
Sheth, Alpen Suresh
Climate change, technological innovation, and financialization are three of the most transformative processes shaping spatial planning and policymaking. Yet, each of these macro-structural processes and their consequences are experienced in the short-term and at geographically-specific scales. In the context of planning, financialization needs to be better understood to evaluate its actual processes and consequences through in-depth analyses of specific cases. Since 2007, India's weather insurance programs have become the largest in the world offering farmers access to new financial instruments and automated technologies to manage the increasing risks of agricultural cultivation. Insurance has come to be seen as a systematic response to the increasing impacts of drought and flooding since the green revolution and an agrarian crisis that has witnessed over 300,000 farmers commit suicide between 1995-2015. In this dissertation, I ask how and why insurance, which never played a significant role several decades ago, has come to be a central planning strategy for agricultural policymakers, outpacing all other government expenditure in the form of premium subsidies. I study the development of weather insurance programs in India and examine implementation across four major agricultural states-Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal, and Punjab-to show how risk transfer in the agricultural sector has been increasingly financialized, with a growing dependence on new derivative instruments and the rising penetration of international reinsurance capital. The overarching research questions motivating my dissertation include: how does the introduction of new insurance policies, financial instruments, and weather technologies impact the agrarian landscape? how do these insurance programs define and measure risk? what are the spatial dimensions of insurance, its variation and its coverage? what is the importance of these developments in terms of how agricultural risk gets financialized for long-term planning as well as political contestation? and what it means to plan for weather risk and climate change in a context of the rapid churning of technologies and the financialization of risk? In my research methodology, I employ granular analysis of actors, agents, and actions, while paying attention to structural positions, systemic rationalities, and recurrent patterns. I conducted interviews with over 40 insurance professionals, underwriters and government experts as well as with 60 farmers and local officials in four states - West Bengal, Maharashtra, Punjab and Andhra Pradesh. I used archival and document analyses as well as spatial analysis of insurance business data to understand and explain spatial variation in policy implementation and outcomes. Amidst the numerous scholarly debates about the role of finance and meaning of financialization, the spatial dimensions of risk and financialization are not well understood. Through my research, I explain financialization of weather risk through an analysis of underwriting methodologies for actuarial models, financial instruments, and automated weather technologies. I show how complexities and shifts in seasonal geographies and temporalities further complicate the extent to which harm, loss, risk can be correlated with financial precision and pricing. I argue that the speed of convergence towards automated and index-based systems has been followed by the disempowerment of farmers who have trouble disputing the terms and eligibility of coverage especially in the case of index insurance contracts, where disputes related to measurement errors and manipulation have had a significant negative effect on adoption, with many states and insurers reducing their offering of such policies. I further argue that the rise of the financialization of risk in the agricultural sector in particular is concurrent with the ascent of a global fast policy environment since the 1970s that facilitates iterative and experimental development of actuarial systems along transnational policy circuits. I contribute archival and empirical findings to show that Indian agricultural policy has witnessed a shift in focus away from the distribution of land, infrastructure, and productivity that were important in post-independence India and the Green Revolution, towards new forms of "riskholding" in the post-Green Revolution period, in which the government focuses on the ways in which the financial risks of agricultural producers are managed and transferred. In my comparative examination of the four states, I show that while insurance mitigates some forms of inequality through subsidies, structural inequalities as a function of inherited landholding disparities and landlessness are reinforced. My overall contention is that agricultural planning and policymaking, specifically through insurance, shifts resources away from longer-term considerations of addressing inequalities of assets such as land and capital, towards the problems of "riskholding," which constitutes a new dimension of differentiation that, in effect, magnifies the salience of short-term financial risk and risk hedging strategies instead of agricultural investment and infrastructure development. Finally, I find that financial risk in its various forms is becoming politicized in ways that are not accounted for in the current literature. I use my case studies to contribute to the literature on the financialization of agriculture (via an intervention in the ongoing debate on the "agrarian question") with a focus on the ways in which insurance subsidies, electoral politics and debt-based mobilization are a manifestation of a more broad-based politics of financialization. The politicization of financial risk ultimately upends the actuarial approach through state-specific variations in implementation through insurance subsidies and loan waivers as electoral strategies. These newly emergent systems are hierarchical and unevenly empower risk capital and new forms of actuarial automation, while risk capital markets and technologies are reshaping the context of planning and the ways weather indicators and indexes are defined and calculated. Furthermore, the uncertainty and severity of climate variability through unseasonal rainfall, drought, flooding, and disease present complex challenges for the very viability of agricultural production that are not adequately addressed through the insurance program, but may in fact, temporarily mask these processes through continued and pervasive ecological extraction and indebtedness. Ultimately, insurance is an incomplete mathematical (actuarial) technology for planning because it assumes fixed aggregate risks and non-correlation of risks. More than the mathematical possibilities and constraints of insurance, new models may show the potential for anti-neoliberal forms of decentralization in insurance and financialization through blockchain and other distributed technology for mutual, peer-to-peer risk management.
Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Urban Studies and Planning, 2017.; Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.; Includes bibliographical references (pages 295-309).
Sun, 01 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMThttp://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/1138022017-01-01T00:00:00ZThree essays on urban economicshttp://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/111373
Three essays on urban economics
Rolheiser, Lyndsey (Lyndsey Anne)
The three chapters contained in this dissertation represent a body of work concerned with ubiquitous municipal issues that affect the economic health, vibrancy, and stability of municipalities. These issues are generated through the interaction between agents within the municipality and the built environment of the municipality. The first chapter investigates the role of postwar housing characteristics in neighborhood decline. Extant literature hypothesizes that postwar vintage specific housing characteristics are contributing more to observations of decline than general housing age as the postwar home is no longer aligned with current consumer demand. I address this hypothesis by empirically separating aging and postwar vintage effects at the neighborhood level. Findings indicate previous empirical results linking postwar housing to decline confounded the age and vintage effect. Once separated, the postwar vintage effect is not a significant source of neighborhood decline as housing age is the driving factor. In the second chapter, I explore the relationship between development patterns and municipal expenditures. Measures that capture the multidimensional aspects of land use patterns exist within the planning and landscape ecology literature but have not been applied to the 'Cost of Sprawl' discourse until now. Using a unique GIS data set covering all of Massachusetts, I construct measures of separation, continuity, centrality, integration, and concentration of residential and commercial land uses within municipalities. Findings suggest some aspects of land use patterns championed by Smart Growth and New Urbanism advocates produce lower levels of municipal expenditures per capita as compared to more sprawling development patterns. The final chapter focuses on the issue of property tax incidence. With increasing reliance upon commercial property tax revenue, it is important that municipalities fully understand the implications of such reliance especially when it comes to attracting and retaining local business. Existing literature on commercial property tax is limited and only a small handful of studies focus on the issue of commercial property tax incidence. I contribute to this slim literature by asking one question in particular: who does the commercial property tax burden fall upon? Based on data from 96 Massachusetts municipalities over 26 years, I find nearly 100% of the burden is passed through to the renter.
Thesis: Ph. D. in Urban Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Urban Studies and Planning, 2017.; Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.; Includes bibliographical references (pages 140-145).
Sun, 01 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMThttp://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/1113732017-01-01T00:00:00ZTo and fro : digital data-driven analyses of pedestrian mobility in urban spaceshttp://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/111372
To and fro : digital data-driven analyses of pedestrian mobility in urban spaces
Vanky, Anthony P. (Anthony Phong)
Understanding how environmental attributes can influence the behavior of pedestrians is of concern for public health officials, transportation engineers, and urban planners. To what degree, if any, do these various environmental characteristics influence how much and for how long people walk? To answer these questions, this thesis analyzes large-scale spatiotemporal pedestrian activity records collected from the users of a mobile phone application in Greater Boston, Massachusetts and the San Francisco Bay Area, California. The dataset contains the locative traces of recreational and utilitarian pedestrian walking activities which include the GPS and temporal records of individuals. In sum, this dissertation considered over 2.2 million trips from 135,000 people. This thesis addresses the topic in three parts. The first study examines the impacts of climate and environment on active transportation trips, and finds varying effects of different types of weather. However, these associated effects are influenced by a trip's purpose, as well as by season and location. The second study analyzes the impact of built environment characteristics on walking activities at the urban scale. These characteristics are generally defined as components of the density, diversity, and design of urban spaces. The study finds that activity characteristics are moderated by the features of location, and that infrastructure for walking, transportation access, and destinations have a positive influence on walking volume. Walking durations are largely invariant to these factors. The third study explores the effects of urban attributes on the aggregated route choices of individuals through the use of revealed preferences. The study's findings suggest that pedestrians are sensitive to the presence of retail destinations and transit availability in their choice of path. Despite this, architectural and street-level design features have mixed effects. These analyses contribute a new approach to understanding the interrelationships between the built environment and pedestrian activity, and how those effects contribute to the walkability of communities. This thesis also tests the usefulness of passive, pervasive mobile devices in evaluating urban space, and considers their potential to aid in the development of human-centered urban design-from an analysis of the quantified self toward the understanding of the quantified community.
Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Urban Studies and Planning, 2017.; Page 157 blank. Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.; Includes bibliographical references (pages 135-156).
Sun, 01 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMThttp://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/1113722017-01-01T00:00:00ZA new climate for regionalism : metropolitan experiments in climate change adaptationhttp://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/111370
A new climate for regionalism : metropolitan experiments in climate change adaptation
Shi, Linda, Ph. D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Climate change threatens the function and even existence of coastal cities, requiring them to adapt by preparing for near-term risks and reorienting long-term development. Most policy and academic interest in the governance of climate adaptation has focused on global, national, and local scales. Their efforts increasingly revealed the need to plan for adaptation at the scale of metropolitan regions. This dissertation is the first academic comparative analysis of U.S. regional adaptation initiatives. Drawing on multi-method qualitative research of five coastal regions, I ask: are collaboratives to coordinate adaptation at the regional scale a new form of regionalism? What roles do state policies on climate change and regional governance play? I argue that adaptation collaboratives are an ecological variant of new regionalism that recenters the role of public agencies in advancing adaptation efforts. Adaptation champions have helped overcome limited local adaptation, even where states are antagonistic to climate action, by sharing knowledge, providing technical assistance, and fostering political support. However, most have yet to tackle the limitations of local adaptation. Instead, they have deployed narratives of climate change as predictable and manageable, and of regional adaptation as localized and ecological in ways that mask the need for more transformative developmental and governance paradigms. Only places with regional agencies or county governments that have land use authority, fiscal leverage, or state mandated targets have advanced region-wide zoning and long-term developmental changes. This indicates that state policies towards regional planning institutions are more influential in shaping regional adaptation than those focused on adaptation. Scholarship has shifted away from debates around forms of regional government, but these findings highlight the need to strengthen regional government in order to overcome difficulties in coordinating, implementing, and enforcing multi-sector and multi-jurisdictional responses to climate change. I conclude by calling for a renewed ecological regionalism that articulates a vision of regions functioning as an ecological whole, rather than as the sum of individual parts. I offer recommendations for how collaboratives and other advocates could build awareness and open dialogue about regional interdependence, conflicts, responsibility, and accountability. These processes become pathways to envisioning local preferences for regional governance, build buy-in and coalitions, and advocate for state enabling legislation.
Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Urban Studies and Planning, 2017.; Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.; Includes bibliographical references (pages 161-175).
Sun, 01 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMThttp://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/1113702017-01-01T00:00:00Z